Example 9.8
vampire
vampires and strange creatures walk everywhere. i used not to
notice them. but once you have seen one you see them everywhere.
between this world and the next, half in life and half out of it. they
prowl, watching, biding their time. they make no hurried moves,
having lived for centuries in slow time. they conserve their energy;
a little goes a long way. watching through the cracks in the everyday
they wait. in their suits and large cars they inhabit our days like
asphalt, like noise, like daily pictures of starvation and atrocity. we
have grown accustomed to them. on street corners, in lounge
rooms, at receptions with silk ties. we learn to live with them. if it’s
your neck their eyes alight upon, you practise the art of merging
with the wallpaper, of slipping into the crowd. there’s safety in
numbers and there’s no shortage of sweet blood: young women, old
women, black women, pale women, women of indiscernible
ethnicity; demure women, feisty women, thin women and voluptuous
women; willing women, angry women, sacrificial women; naive
women, jaded women, elusive women and dwarf women. one can
lose oneself in this cornucopia. like wildebeests in the mob, we run
together and watch as one falls, her body opened and flowing out
across the tongue of the vampire.
vampires are everywhere. even those you cannot escape
are seldom fatal. you may find your flesh shrinking. sometimes
the taste of disgust is almost unbearable. sometimes the image
of death smirks in the mirror. these horrors fade under the glare of
day and you go about your business. after all there’s no escape when
the door opens each morning and closes each night behind you.
even vampires you learn to tolerate, like incest or corruption or
disease, which are, after all, part of life and part of the death that
creeps through the veins of the ghouls that couple in the mysterious
ways of their choice with the living.If the body is not a ‘being’, but a variable boundary, a surface whose
permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural
field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, then what
language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender, that
constitutes its ‘interior’ signification on its surface?Judith Butler208 The Writing Experiment